Knowledge, empowerment, and action: testing the empowerment theory in a tourism context

With resident empowerment widely recognized as a prerequisite for sustainable tourism development, this study tested how residents’ perceived knowledge of tourism affects their perceptions of psychological, social, and political empowerment through tourism, and how these, in turn, lead to their political action regarding tourism using Rocha’s (1997 Rocha, E. M. (1997). A ladder of empowerment. Journal of Planning Education and Research, 17(1), 31–44. doi:10.1177/0739456X9701700104[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) theory of empowerment. Rocha (1997 Rocha, E. M. (1997). A ladder of empowerment. Journal of Planning Education and Research, 17(1), 31–44. doi:10.1177/0739456X9701700104[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) conceptualized empowerment as beginning at the individual level and eventually welling up into the community level, with political action being the ultimate outcome of community empowerment. To test the hypothesized relationships, data were collected from residents of a booming wine tourism destination (i.e. Fredericksburg, Texas, USA) and analyzed via structural equation modeling. Results indicated that perceived knowledge had positive impacts on perceived psychological, social, and political empowerment, but only social and political empowerment were likely to generate political action. The positive influence of tourism knowledge on political action was partially mediated by social and political empowerment. The findings align with the Rocha’s (1997 Rocha, E. M. (1997). A ladder of empowerment. Journal of Planning Education and Research, 17(1), 31–44. doi:10.1177/0739456X9701700104[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) theory and suggest empowerment starts at the individual level and moves up to collective empowerment. The findings also underscore the link between knowledge and empowerment, with perceived knowledge of tourism being an important precursor to a sense of resident empowerment and political action regarding tourism.